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More Peeks at Clinton Campaign Turmoil

By Kate Phillips August 10, 2008 12:27 pmAugust 10, 2008 12:27 pm

If you just can’t wait until Tuesday, when Joshua Green’s article in The Atlantic lands with a few hundred leaked emails among Clinton campaign staff who seemed to be constantly at war with one another, you can instead look at portions of the article itself that have been leaked.

The notion that advisers to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton fought furiously among themselves at times is, in and of itself, not new news. Nor is it particularly new that top strategist Mark Penn wanted her to go on the offensive against her rival Barack Obama, and paint him as different, somehow un-American. The Times’s James Rutenberg and Peter Baker disclosed Mr. Penn’s urgings to Mrs. Clinton and her campaign that she fly the flag and brand all her strategies as “American” this or that, in an article published in June.

But the level of infighting detail and strategy fallout over how to defeat Mr. Obama in Mr. Green’s anticipated article, excerpts of which were published by The Politico’s Mike Allen today, will be released against the current maelstrom surrounding Senator Clinton’s role at the convention and whether the Obama campaign will abide by her wish to let her supporters — her 1,600 or so delegates — vent.

And exposing all those fault lines as her campaign battled Mr. Obama’s candidacy probably won’t make it any easier for party leaders to portray a unified Democratic front at the convention, given the fractious divide during the protracted primary season.

The article will also be published after weeks in which Senator John McCain’s campaign has touted his “Country First” symbols in advertisements, and while the Republican candidate himself has taken Mr. Obama to task for his positions on Iraq, accusing the Democrat of caring more about winning the campaign than winning the war.

Mr. Allen writes:

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine American electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

A key take-away from the article is that Clinton received a lot of accurate advice, including from Penn. He wrote a remarkably prescient memo in March 2007 about the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” and specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS”—exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later.

But no one synthesized and acted on the good advice.

“The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men,” Green writes. “[H]er advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. … [S]he never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.

“What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.”

Another Penn strategy, leaked from Mr. Green’s article (and portions of which we had published in June), said of Mr. Obama: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

“Save it for 2050. … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back …

“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”

In the arc of this year, from the primary season through this summer, there remains no question that Mr. Obama and his campaign responded to some of the attacks and undercurrents that created perceptions that he wasn’t “American enough.” He began emphasizing more heavily his biography, his upbringing and began sporting that flag lapel pin whose absence on his suit jackets had caused troubled perceptions.

The Atlantic’s article hits the stands on Tuesday, and not only details infighting among Clinton staff but also exposes more of the role played by former President Bill Clinton in the campaign as well as Senator Clinton’s seeming inability to strike a coherent, harmonious managerial style for her campaign.

Stay tuned. The about-to-be published email traffic among her advisers alone may be what someone teased today as “porn for pols.”

Campaigns can be a good indicator about how someone will govern. We’ve got Clinton and, to an extent, McCain with too many loose cannons all over the place, indecision and lack of a coherent strategy. I’m sure the Obama campaign’s had its moments, but from fund raising to the use of funds, it’s been masterful.

We’ll see how this article plays out, but the timing couldn’t be worse for Hillary as the convention’s coming in two weeks!

She imploded because, for better or worse, she’s a fighter not a leader. Obama will make the better president.

And we women need to get over this Hillary or die thing right now or we’re going to end up with a President McCain and a Supreme Court that will be sending our daughters to back alley butchers. He’s so much as promised it.

The clarity and control with which Sen. Obama manages his campaign are perhaps one of the best reasons to vote for him as the next president. He’s smart as a whip, a good family man, and now we can see that he is an ideal boss. Obama’s candidacy inspires many to do their best work. Sen. Clinton and Sen. McCain: people I’d want to work for? Not so much.

Can you imagine the ammunition the republicans now will have to work with in the next days leading up to the election.?This racism business that they would like to accuse McCain of was going to be used against Obama. So realy it is about names and race even for the holier than thou left of center democrats. They are eating their young.

As a latina, I’m deeply sad that Senator Clinton lost this nomination.

She was the better candidate. Obama just gives me the creeps. I hope McCain wins now.

And how conveeeeeenient is that the Obama camp and his media cheerleaders leaked these memos just when Hillary’s supporters want a roll call vote at the convention. I smel a rat…

Anyway, the article is just a hit piece to try to damage Senator Clinton. As always, the media doing their “job”. By the way, they did extremely well hiding the Edwards scandal, you know, he is an Obama supporter and they had to protect him.

Oh well, the “democratic-media” party is a mess. They deserve to lose.

This article and the revelations in are a disaster for Obama and the Democratic party:

-After claiming for weeks that sexism brought her down, it’s more than clear that Hillary managed her campaign badly and that had more to do with her defeat than anything else.

-How are Obama’s supporters supposed to be encouraged to donate money to clear Hillary’s debt, most of which is owed to herself and Mark Penn, after reading this?

-People govern in similar ways to how they run their campaigns. We see today that McCain is disorganized and prone to “going with the last suggestion he heard on his cellphone.” Hillary was a disaster. Perhaps Obama, with nothing to lose and everything to prove against “experienced” people, was the only person who put in an honest day’s work of creating a real functioning government-in-waiting.

You can disagree with Obama all you want on policy and cultural values issues but it is undeniable that he’s run a competent, professional and disciplined campaign. He’s a very smart person and that’s why the GOP is desperate to define him as an elitist airhead before the convention and presidential debates.

To accurately discern the character of a candidate is to see beyond the distracting noise projected by its campaign. Good campaigns are powered by persuasion and strong leadership. Hillary is tenacious without a doubt, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into leadership skills. The McCain campaign is worse, offering even less leadership and more manipulation.

This is all very interesting, but it just validates what a lot of us had surmised long ago without knowing all the gory insider details; as many of us had suspected, Clinton ran a very disorganized campaign, and her executive leadership failures were her undoing. Had she been a stronger leader and better CEO of her campaign, the outcome might have been different. Hindsight is 20/20.

Even though HRC did play the populist game (“the white rural/working class
are my property”), I respect her for not going full tilt on Penn’s plan.
McCain’s “country first” hits a similar note to Penn’s “the other” insinuation and both are dancing with the devil (fascism), sowing the seeds of ignorance and shallow-minded nationalism. I guess it’s whatever it takes to preserve the oligarchy. These are toxic games to play that can end with ugly results. If only McCain could have run a positive/ informative campaign.

Re: Country First, Poor McCain is incapable of understanding the a good part of the answer to our dilemma is based on our actions outside of our borders.

The campaigns ultimately reflects the candidates and give us an idea how they would govern.

Clinton had no overarching goals or principles, at least from what we could see. Having no particular vision of her own, she hired “professionals” to feed her. On the war she was flat out 180 degrees wrong, for example.

As to McCain, he likes to shoot and bomb. He’s a shortstop, not a long ball slugger. He also lacks any long term vision. The worst part is he’s too old. Just watch him all hunch backed as he stumbles down the ramp of an airplane. His imipression reflects his whole stance: Bomb, bomb, and bomb some more…

Clearly you could have been on the Clinton staff…little understanding of what honesty and dignity means to voters and an unwillingness to face the truth…the rats you smell worked for Clinton and they are clearly telling all. Perhaps if her female supporters had urged her to play fair, she would be the nominee. Most of you mistakenly thought being “tough” meant being “mean-spirited”. You will have plenty of time to consider who your candidate hired and how well they did or did not serve her.

More evidence that the Democratic party has chosen the right candidate in Barack Obama. As we have known all along, Hillary Clinton ran a bad campaign. The recent news about John Edwards reinforces the notion that this time, finally, we have the best candidate to go into the general election. I can feel an anxious twinge when I realize it could have been either Hillary Clinton or John Edwards as our candidate. It would have been another example of Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? At the very time the party needs desperately to come together and bring in the Clinton supporters, the press and the Obamatrons are still clinging to old hate rhetoric and nasty post mortems.

I hope all this is making the Obamatrons feel better…cause the price for all the gloating will be high indeed.

During Bush’s presidency Americans were repeatedly deceived. GWB pushed the powers of the presidency to a point where it was dangerously close to totalitarianism. His striving for loyalty put people in power who were corrupt or inept or both.

Hillary Clinton showed a willingness to lie that equals or exceeds the abilities of Bush/Cheney. The Boznia airport incident may be forgotten by Clintonites but for independents it was a big deal. All candidates stretch or distort the truth but making up a story and repeating it over and over suggested to me that her presidency would have been like Bush’s.

She lost, we already know her campaign was dysfunctional. Running out of money is inexcusable and we may get more details on how poorly run it was managed. Without those details it is apparent to many that although she was effective campaigner she simply was not composed of the right stuff.

As said many times, it was Hillary Clinton’s nomination to loose. It is quite apparent that she lost control of the campaign, which caused her to go deep into debt and to use attack tactics that turned off a number of voters. The lack of control by Hillary Clinton shows that her organization skills are lacking to be President of the United States.

With that said, John McCain’s campaign is almost a carbon copy of the Hillary Clinton campaign. With the exception of the money issue (special interests are handling that), the organization looks just a disorganized and one must think that infighting is going on between John McCain and his advisers.

In the end, Barack Obama is showing the best unity and organization of the three campaigns. This speaks highly of what kind of president Barack Obama would be; if elected.

Can’t wait for the big wake-up to all of you Obama cult fans- Try as you might- this is a candidate who based a campaign on a speech that was so unimportant it didn’t even make the local news- Obama was a part-time state senator- He has never done anything courageous in his life- Never stayed at anything longer than he needed to in order to step on shoulders to get to the next level- Again the Democrats have chosen the least electable candidate- The media knows the stories will be told- the history of their complicity is ready for the text books- They still try to put down the first viable, experienced woman candidate- They gave us the run up to the war- two terms of Bush and now we’ll have McCain- way to go NY Times et al-

Now, how dare you lecture me on honesty, dignity and truth. You see, that’s the problem with you, Obama’s cultists, you think you are above everyboby, you guys are so elitist, that’s why your candidate doesn’t connect with the working class.

Again, this piece hit has only come out to damage Senator Clinton. The media has an obssesion with her and they only leak her memos… again, how convenient.

I would like to see those memos of Axelrod telling “The One” to use the race card on Mc Cain to see if he gets a bump on the polls, because, you know, I don’t see the landslide anywhere.

And you cannot denied that he used the race card this time (dollar bill anyone), because he did. The problem this time was that he got caught with his pants down and the Republicans don’t take crap from no one.

Do you guys really think that trashing and trashing and trashing Hillary will get Obama Hillary’s votes? It’s doing the opposite. Damage is done.

Like the article itself, all the comments here are just another set-up against Clinton. It took this smear campaign from the mainstream media plus millions of dollars from predatory lenders and the Donna Brazile – Karl Rove manipulation of the caucuses, Florida and Michigan to put this freshman knucklehead over the top by a few delegates. It’s shameless behavior from people who call themselves Americans.

Well, as a Latino, I find it hard to believe anyone who says they supported HRC could so easily delude themselves into believing McCain would be a superior choice for President than Obama. FYI, the man just so happens to be a supporter of every initiative Hillary put forward – as opposed to Mccain, who is anti-immigration, against a women’s reproductive rights, and has pledged to continue with Bush’s war-first and economic policies.. ??

It’s obvious these forums are routinely hijacked by neo-con republicans, who claim to be disaffected HRC supporters; however in case you’re sincere, a few facts – it Was Clinton’s Own People who provided the source material for The Atlantic’s stories, not anyone having to do anything from Obama, please try to stop deluding yourselfe.

Next week, the truth will come out and everyone in America will see that the reason Hillary lost to Obama had nothing to do with ‘rampant sexism in the media;’ – it had to do with her lack of organizational skills and leadership.
Say what you want re: Obama’s inexperience (a justifiable issue); he still had the brains and more than enough experience to beat the very ‘experienced’ Clinton’s.
And lest you forget, it was Hillary, not Obama who dragged the fight into the gutter the minute she realized she was being outflanked; the realization for me and the millions of others who recognized it being she wanted to win, at any costs; I count myself amoung the few who would rather lose with a decent candidate, that win with a disgraceful one. Call me old fashioned..

One of the most interesting revelations from the upcoming article in The Atlantic (per the Huffington Post) is that it was Bill Clinton, not Hillary, who made the final decision to run the infamous “3:00 a.m.” T.V. ad. The fact that Hillary was still letting Bill make the tough critical strategy decisions puts the lie to the claim of “Hillary’s Harpies” that Hillary was the tough “in Charge” woman who could tame Bill and who would handle the tough decisions as her “own woman” when she became president. Well…apparently not. The evidence now seems to indicate that when the going got tough (e.g.-deciding on whether to run the 3:00 a.m. ad) Hillary stepped back into the role she was the most comfortable and familiar with–she let Bill make the final decision. For me, this eppisode simply confirms my suspicion that electing Hillary would have been a masquarade for the reality, which would have been 4 more years of Bill Clinton running the show.

Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign appears reluctant to have any sort of roll call vote at the Democratic convention this month,” ABC’s Jake Tapper reports. “Why? They have no interest in highlighting the narrowness of his victory.”

You see the victory was a narrow one. It’s not like Senator Clinton won only 50 delegates. Stop diminishing her run, it was historic, yes, she made mistakes, she is flawed and doesn’t pretend to be perfect like “The One”, but she had the whole media against her, beating her the 24 hours of the day and you know what, she beat the crap out of him in the last primaries.

The Obama camp has put together this nice video in which they debunk point-by-point the latest McCain attack ad. Enjoy. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGIqGaWZOo0. Be sure you get the facts. Obama’s tax plan would not raise taxes on ANYONE making under 250,000 dollars. Not payroll, not capital gains, nothing. Zilch.

My perception was that the Clinton’s were a bit bullish. They considered themselves the rulers of the party and when other folks wanted to make their way, it had to be with their blessings. The audacity of Obama just astounded them, and they were not ready for a serious challenge. I feel that the Republicans would have torn Clinton to pieces, or they would have made her so anxious to prove her forcefulness that she would have been a worse hawk than McCain. Either way it would have been a loss for Democratic Party principles.

What I like about Obama is that he is an expert at navigating treacherous waters. Race; gender; social class; unfair attacks, and the list goes on and on. Obama can negotiate in tricky situations and has an astounding ability for diplomacy. The other thing I like about him is that he is not handled. He leads his campaign, and there is no doubt who is at the helm. You’ll never have the Obama campaign stating that Obama does not speak for the campaign. Not only that, but he instills a confidence in people. He is encouraging and tells the American people “Yes we Can!” That is an awesome message. He is an awesome candidate and I hope the Clintons will put their bruises behind them and help to restore America to her Constitutional principles.

President Obama drew criticism on Thursday when he said, “we don’t have a strategy yet,” for military action against ISIS in Syria. Lawmakers will weigh in on Mr. Obama’s comments on the Sunday shows.Read more…